Use these words to build your poem, ok? 11 words only. The return of sanity finally.

And for another building block for your poem, we need a theme, or a hook. And it’s this: the gaze of the other.

You know clarity often comes unexpectedly. I was reading Mark Doty’s dog memoir today and there’s this moment that came toward the end of the book, when he has a sick retriever at home and then had an encounter with a stray dog, a yellow-ochre cross breed, on a street in Mexico. The pawing of the hand, the surrender of the weight of her head in both his hands. It opened his heart. A heart that was walled up in despair. With that openness, that nakedness, it billowed open. He felt compassion, grief and sorrow for her lot. But not hopeless.

So it is that with every one of us, we can contain sorrow and we can contain joy.

Then comes this gem of a sentence: “How should we know ourselves, except in the clarifying mirror of some other gaze?”